Performance and the Subject

Introduction



It is important to distinguish performance from performativity: the former presumes a subject, but the latter contests the very notion of the subject.
Judith Butler


The subject is a variable complex formation of discourse and power. One might argue that subject is impediment. For to be subject is to be someone else by dependence and tied to his own identity by a conjunction of ‘self’ and knowledge.
Stuart Hall.


The next question was - what makes planets go around the sun? At the time of Kepler some people answered this problem by saying that there were angels behind them beating their wings and pushing the planets around an orbit. As you will see, the answer is not very far from the truth. The only difference is that the angels sit in a different direction and their wings push inward. For me, it is a pity that Einstein's idea doesn't work. The reasonable thing just doesn't work.
Richard Feynman
















The starting point on the subject is that almost all philosophical orientations today, even if they strongly oppose each other, agree on some kind of basic anti-subjectivist stance. ‘The subject is ossifying’, although not yet a clamour has become a consensus view. The feeling is that the dynamism of the subject has exhausted itself and is now in terminal decline. Some suggest the subject, or self, if not dead, is in an ‘oxygen tent’ and we are beginning to become haunted by its gradual disappearance.1 Bearing in mind the tide of subjection we face round the clock; politics, education, consumerism, media, it could be confidently claimed ours is an age in which the individual subject is in increasing search of itself.

Yet it is a requisite of liberal, democratic politics to presuppose the existence of individual subjects. These citizen/subjects are deemed capable of reflective and critical distance from a possible course of action. They are also assumed to be equal to the task of taking and being charged with unique responsibility for those actions. Such democratic societies encourage unfettered, public debate in the belief that their subjects would be ultimately responsive to the force of better reasons and would act accordingly, i.e. at the polling booth. Yet throughout many contemporary social science and humanities disciplines, a widespread and deep scepticism about the possibility of such individual agency and such responsiveness reigns. It follows that such contemporary scepticism in regard to the subject must impact on notions of that currently highly esteemed concept of ‘performance’.

Certainly, ‘performance’ plays a major part in the election of our political leaders, Tony Blair has been described as ‘...a great performer’, (The Scotsman, 12th July, 2003).2 Indeed the choice for the ‘leader of the ‘free world’ has hinged on the performance of presidential candidates in television debates and this has been a constant since Nixon v Kennedy in the 1960s, now embedded in performance lore.3

(For acess to the complete work - email drpcheevers@yahoo.co.uk)

Why the Grass isn’t Green and the Sky isn’t Blue and your Blood is not Red.

You go through your school life with your English teachers (Bless) telling you what a Metaphor is - and for the rest of your days, it is more than likely; you will view metaphor as one, or all of the following:

a) Metaphor expresses similarities, used mainly in poetic flourish or by politician in rhetorical persuasion.
b) Metaphors occur when a word is allotted to not what it normally designates but to something else.
c) You are given to understand by the teachers that there are pre-existing similarities between what words normally designate.

So you leave school with a sense that metaphors are, well, kind of linguistically deviant - should have an ASBO wrapped round them for they are saying one thing while meaning another. Anyway shouldn’t language if used in its proper sense be literal. Eh well, no.
Follow me into my garden and I will endeavour to make my point...

(For access to full article email magazine)

I suppose we were just meant for each other - destined to meet.

All of us, find it hard to escape the attraction of lyricism, the fairytale, minstrels that enchanted universe of goblins and fairies so redolent in our Harry Pottterish world. For we live in a world of wall to wall media with its techno-tele-discursivity, telling us how to think and x factor techno-tele-iconicity telling us who to adore. Most of us just grin and bear these pathological aspects of modernity.

Why not be stoic anyway? because overhead there is lowering sky called seductive capitalism with its massive investment in the escapism of ‘luv’, from pop songs to women’s magazines downwards. Yes charismatic capitalism with its proselytising zeal that induces desire, the kind of purchasing desire that once induced must be sated. Does this apply to love. Does the discourse on love go unrecognised. Is love domination accepted?

“Our antennas were trembling at that first meeting. We both just knew it. It wasn;t tht long afterwadsthat we were married. Has the woman just unknowingly just triggered her dispositions and entered marriage as calculated submission?

I was talking to friends and associates about how they first met and I though this could be turned into a game show by say, Simon Bowel, he could stage it in a Roman amphitheatre
”We had such similar tastes in everything.” I stayed schtum, but the view that marriage between people with the same social characteristics, is a form of inbreeding floated across my mental screen.
“I don’t know what it was about him, I think it was his bearing. You know, the way he carried himself.” So he had performed his manly role well. “I don’t know... with her...it was the way she walked, her gait, the tilt of her head - she had played her, coquettish, demure female part well. Hearing this just strengthened my view that identity is performance.
“Something told me to go to the cafe that night with my friend, and that’s where we met. The moment I looked at him. I knew, I can’t put it into words...” Don’t worry others will, with their incomparably lucid evocation from Mills and Boon to chic lit, stretching into an infinity where all the trees have been used up.
“It wasn’t long before I was thinking of...well marriage really...the white dress, the ceremony, the full works. Never thought that would happen to me. Perhaps it was just fate that I met him that night.” “Perhaps it was” I acquiescd. Yes, amor fati, that love of fate, with its baggage of acceptance of the determined or predetermined course. Haven’t we all fallen for that one.

If you feel all this has a comic pedantry, part of some medieval fabliaux, you are on the right track. As these friends continued to recount the tale of their romance and subsequent marriage, a ghostly bearded figure like Hamlet’s father fleeted across my mind and in sonorous Darwinian tones boomed, “All these meeting are driven by biology.” Jesus, I thought, I will have to get a move on myself if I want to have children.
But I kept on interviewing the couples. So these couples told how they were in love, as they understood it. As their relationships intensified, they began to view the other as quasi divine creatures. Now they were on the magical island of love where there is full reciprocity. Where you entrust yourself to the other, and authorise the atonement of yourself to the other, A work of mutual recognition takes place, which Jean Paul Satre said makes you feel, ‘justified in existing’.

And this island is on a wondrous archipelago where you are just accepted with all your negative particularities and at your most contingent. Here in this love bliss, a state of disinteredness, based on the happiness of giving happiness. It is and inexhaustible reason for wonder. On this island of pure love, couples give themselves to each other, thereby excluding themselves from common circulation. Yet pure love, like art for art’s sake, is a relatively recent historical invention.

Some of the men talked to me of their ‘stag nights’ with misty reminiscence. As the tales of this strange male phenomeonon unfolded each sounded more and more like a bunch of Norse men with horns getting pissed in Ramsgate after a rocky landing in their long boats. So I went to one, as another of my. “I ‘m nearing 30 now,” of my friends ‘bit the dust’.
“She brought him to his knees.” “He was putty in her hands.”
Over the beer in the pub, they shook their heads. Yes, he had succumbed, hadn’t he, to that fatal attraction. Their words, in that male way, rang out like verdicts. “You’ll be next.” They said to me accusingly. “What me, never.”
“It was the pillow talk, wasn’t it?” The lads taunted him, the hooked one, the soon to be married. Yes, the forces that are suspected of working in the darkness, of binding men, of entrapping. The vagina dentata had struck again for men enfold and women ensnare, they didn’t say. But as they went on, tacitly branded the woman as a decadent voluptuary for stealing one of their mates. For this was a ‘stag nigh’ and these were men, and they were acting out the permanent dispositions that being masculine triggers and awakens.

As they reflected further how he had fallen madly in love with her, their laddish reflections, with their fixations to immaturity just serving to reinforce the androcentric mythology. Yes that fatal attraction affecting the social order of male dominance, embedded in our psyches from Aphrodite to Eve had worked it’s magic again, making them forget the obligation linked to their social dignity as men.

As they continued to muse not allowing for an instant, that they as men are invariably in a state of subterranean tension, like an enclave of negation. You know the weight of it just being men, and their anxiety about being men like some exotic peculiarities never spoken of and the resulting uncertainty leading to frantic circular investment in just achieving the target of being, well you know, a ‘man’.

When the landlord called time, afterwards, in that British way, there wasn’t a public toilet to be found, so it was down the alley to urinate against the wall. And this with much hearty laugher ended in a contest as to who could piss highest. It could have been a potency contest for 12 year olds. Alex won, but then he’s a fire man/fighter.

Then it was my turn, theres isn’t the space to tell you the whys and wherefores. But I do remember standing by her at the ceremony. How I had worked on my body in the gym, and she had worked too, to make herself trim and neat. Men do such gym things to make themselves bigger, women to make themselves smaller. .

Then the ceremony, we all need ceremony. I think of it now. The priest in his cassock, she in her silk dress that piece of clothing that like the priest’s cassock that neither prescribes or proscribes. And her minimal maquilage that denoted what? Allure. The cosmesis of it all, me in my first suit for yonks, which made me feel as if just I just had plastic surgery. What did the suit denote anyway, honour?

We took our vows in language effectively vowing to resolve our differences in non-coercive and non manipulative ways. And how would we manage to do that? Well we would use those twin transcending towers; we would be both rational and yes, reasonable. I mean if you want to achieve a consensual action you use the bargaining tools available to rational and thinking people

We vowed this both publicly and privately in the belief that these stubborn notions of rationality and reason would impose order on our chaotic manifold of impulses. Of course it is a given that in employing these two stale and obstinate notions they must be recognised de facto and unquestioning, for they are like objectivity, trans discursive and trans subjective. Now I think, how impotent and arbitrary is utopian thinking.
I remember those communicative signs, the ‘gifts and then there were the speeches.

Heavily male. Where innuendo snuck in, eh, tastefully of course.
Men with their speeches as if by their words they were magically been handed the skeptron, that Greek staff of bygone ages. And that by their just standing to speak there was some Godly call to order. There should be a sacralising separation, or so they thought. For men were about to speak, and they did so, by believing that they were drawing on external sources, words. But it was words that were drawing them in the linguistic sphere and just releasing the springs and pulleys that constitute male dispositions. Meanwhile, as I recall, the women watched, feminine, demure,coquettish.

I recall the mute suffering on the face of my Mediterranean mum giving her son away. There she was employing the means of the weak, the tearful outburst, as she squeezed the life out of a tiny laced white handkerchief. As people comforted her with mollifying words, or overly personal addresses of “Darling; or “Dear” or chucked her cheek, she was accepting of this sympa behaviour exemplify her marked propensity for self denigration.
Then there was the father-in-law, an Edwardian gentleman straight out of the pages of Virginia Woolf. I recalled how on the lawn afterwards he narrowed his eyes and looked to the horizon as if to say
‘You will understand one day.” The gloating of prophylactic prediction all over him. Yes, for this man who had deserted just about everybody, including three wives, all this was a kind of ludic illusion. He was at pains that you would remember his ‘ I told you so’ shots off the bow, while the retrospective triumph would be his. This man was always full of the pleasure of disillusioning. As if fitting to his male statutory loftiness he was an anthropologist but a pessimistic one. This man, for sure, would die standing, preferably by a crag of rock where in the future people would come to reflect by the cairn of rocks that was his monument to steadfast maleness. Or so he believed. He was a man alright, but prehistoric. His demeanour full of that totalising critique, like those experts hauled onto television couches, the intellectual theocracy giving out their critiques that reduce most to utter despair and defeatism. These latte literati, are an exploitative class of mediation and meaning who are unregulated, unmediated,

Then there was the Honeymoon in Venice, where we wandered past ‘Harry's Bar' and laughed uproariously. So here we were on our Honemoon in Venice, being in love was like a truce; love as the suspension of power relations, a deadly break in the natural order. A miraculous truce has taken place, where the dominant (male) seems dominated. And as if by magic male violence and coarseness has been stilled; civilized by stripping social relations of their brutality. We were in love, the state where couples lose themselves in each other in suspension of object and subject. It is a state where there is no temptation to dominate for one is blissfully beyond the alternatives of egoism and altruism and in this complicitious stage there is little need for the distortion of compromise.

But can the enchanted island of love endlessly threatened by the return of egoistic calculation be snatched from the icy waters of calculation, violence and self-interest. Years later I would recall those marriage vows - as if rationality and reason were free from illusion and self-deception, not as a pile of debris growing skywards.

Is love then, domination accepted, unrecognised. Has the woman entered marriage as calculated submission. Is her behaviour the complicity of the dominated? Was being in love the suspension of the dominant symbolic violence, or did it then become the extreme, the most subtle, the most invisible form of violence?

*(If you like this kind of thinking - then read
Pierre Bourdieu, I could not have written this without him).

Hell in fractured French

Hell, in Fractured French.
Like Alice he had fallen down a hole into a weird world. So this was it, finally had made it, to hell. But it was nothing like he had envisaged, none of that burning in eternal flames; no boiling tar when he asked for a cup of water; none of the Catholic indoctrination of his youth. In fact, strangely what he got was an offer of biscuits and tea and eh...sympathy. No, this was a different kind of hell.
This hell was a group who were talking about their experiences and all in fractured French which he strained to understand. I know it sounds like a gentle kind of hell, like some intermediate language group meeting up as a break from the tedium of knitting and bowls, but the hell was of it was, its subtlety.
For these people, you see, weren’t devils, no, no, they were good solid burghers, some educated, some not, and their horns only appeared when they talked delightedly of this incident or that which had struck them since they last met.
As the self congratulatory reportage of this item they had seen in the newspapers or they had seen on the television rolled out, the hell of it only became apparent when you asked, “How do you know that to be true?” And a more devilish side would show when they indignantly responded, “It was in the papers and on television”.
But being a new boy in hell, unwisely you would persist “...this thing you read about, this latest phenomenon, how do you know it is beautiful?” and you would get baleful looks. “It’s say so here, in this magazine.” “But beauty is a transitory thing, you know Rubinesque women in one century and stick thin models in another...” But the hellish futility of it, as they all smiled sympathetically at this new boy, would make the words die on your lips. ‘And why was all this being conveyed in lousy French?’ you wanted to scream but you knew you couldn’t for this nightmare was ruled over by civilised restraint. You were slow, but you were learning
You see this was a genteel hell, for you were allowed in a very courteous way to bring up what you wanted to say, “You know on the way down here I saw...” but when you would express sympathy for the demonstrators you had seen naively voicing their discontent at Lucifer’s gates, you were immediately pounced on for being a sympathiser with violence, and you knew for all eternity there would not be a recognition that the violence was coming from the other side. It was an awful feeling, just awful, that the violence of silence ruled here.
But come on, enough is enough, you wanted to scream at them all, ‘...all your reportage...on the television...in the newspapers, it is all virtual. Even the bloody language you use is virtual, even you, the subjects you so confidently think you are, it is all virtual.’ But you suppressed your scream because it would have been ridiculous in this genteel place where all they knew and would forever know was the virtual.
So with a mind wrenching clarity it dawned, here you had to play the polite game, the courteous exchange, for it was the only way, you were permitted to ask anything. So you would enquire in that hellishly civil way, “Well...eh what happens here, eh... in hell. You know what do you do with yourselves in the eh... evenings?” You had asked the right question, clever boy, for your polite enquiry brought about a communal glow of self satisfaction.
“Oh, you know, we watch the news on television, just to keep informed, you see, so as we know what is going on. Then most of us have a sherry or two on the balcony and read the newspapers. It’s lovely you see because all of our balconies face the sun.”
“Do they, really?”
And you would think of the occupants of those balconies; billions, trillions of them all facings the sun, all contentedly committing the blasphemy of thinking they could convert the unknown into the comfort of the known. And why is it all in fractured French?
Oh, what a future hell is this to be here for all eternity with human mermaids basking on their verandas in the sun, contentedly thinking they had straddled both worlds.

If you wish to find a message in a Godard film then Cherchez Le Pimp!

If You Want to Find the Message in a Godard Film,
then Cherchez le Pimp!

John Kriedl, Jean-Luc Godard Twayne Publishers (Boston 1980), reminds us
that in a study made of prostitution in France in the last days of the IV
Republic (1954-58), it was revealed that one out of every eighty Parisians
women were prostitutes. The prostitute can thus be seen as a protagonist of
French society. Accordingly, Jean-Luc Godard moved the prostitute to the
centre of his first five films.

Now if one goes to Godard¹s earlier film work Breathless, A Woman Is a
Woman, and The Little Soldier, we see the beginnings of a subjection of
women to a rigorous semiotics scrutiny. Godard¹s women appeared almost
extra-filmic, leaning out of his films, and as they did so, were subjected
to a rigorous, almost Gestapo-like questioning. Kriedl goes on to argue that
continuing this train in his film work, Godard introduced a technique for
analysing women that was a total break from all Hollywood convention; a
technique, Kriedl asserts, that borrows from sources as wide apart as
Umberto Eco, the TV Interview, and Russian Formalism.

This technique is called experimental semioticization, which means reducing
the character to a bunch of signifiers, stripped of any psychologism, and
making these signifiers belong to a class, concept or ism, such as
prostitution. This external semiotisation of a female character was a
technique totally new up to 1962 in France and 1968 in USA, which violated
all the character conventions pertaining to female images.

So if we search for a semantic meaning in a Godard film we rapidly find
information systems that tell us we are observing pimps and prostitutes.
Therefore we follow what narrative there is, until we see the prostitute
signifiers. These will also signify pimps and the signs we receive are
those giving the sense of prostitutes controlled by hidden pimps - in other
words, behind every prostitute is a hidden pimp.

Godard¹s semiotics on the sexual element of the prostitute/pimp
relationship, were of course just the codes and signs which pointed towards the real Mafia in our society. An illustration of this would be Godard¹s response to women undressing in his films. He stoutly defended this, and would point out that the real pimps in this area of our society are the ones who dress women. Taking this
Semiotic decoding a step further we find in Breathless that the Inspector is
the pimp of the law; yet, we also find that, even worse, by law is meant
(the real Mafiosa) the economic law. Therefore a successful decoding
process for the Godard film would necessarily take us through the following
steps:

1. Assume that each film will contain a prostitute and a pimp; evidence of
one is evidence of the other.

2. See that in an extension of the prostitute/pimp story, the pimp can be
the state or an agency of the state, and sexual prostitution will not be the
only signifier for the prostitute shown in the film. The signs showing the
pimp's control will stand for societal forced prostitution and will search
out what the character is really unwilling to do but does anyway.

3. Recognise that part of the prostitute/pimp story will have a
self-referential element that is Godard¹s self-criticism of his own, i.e.
deploring the artist (Godard) selling out to a capitalism.

4. Assume that the resolution to the story line of the film must happen
later, in real life, and that the film we saw is episodic, not final. Its
beginning happened before the film and its end will be found later, or, in
the next Godard film.

The pimp/prostitute relationship was one of Godard's bêtes noires and it
was through this device that he hoped to concentrate minds on larger social
issues.

"If Only your Daughter would Speak Up imore in the Classroom."

If Only your Daughter would ‘Speak Up in Class’.
We are attending a parents evening for our daughter (let’s call her Renata) and it is becoming worrying how each successive teacher laments if only our daughter would
“Speak up a little more in class. She is a confident girl but very quiet.”

Miffed we walk home querying each other is she really that quiet? Well if she is then who is to blame? Easy, of course it us, her parents.

So as parents when she has gone to bed we starts discussing this problem of Renata’s language, or lack of it in class. This is a child who luckily has no learning or speech difficulties. We try to think back on where if and where we might have gone wrong.

“Remember how demanding she used to be for those bedtime stories.” We recalled at about three she was already hungry for the strict rules that these bedtime stories must have a beginning, middle and an end. What we didn’t know - this would come later when I started some research into language - that there is a growing consensus in Western thought and science that we may understand ourselves and our world more deeply if we think in terms of patterns of relationships rather than of reified essences or entities. This pattern dependency seems strictly human for nothing like this obsession with extracting hidden patterns is seen in other animals. Interestingly this pattern-hunger isn’t limited to speech, people who cannot speak hunt down patterns in sign language.

So perhaps we were guilty for inculcating her with this fixation for extracting hidden patterns. Without knowing it we had brought her up as if we were from some strict sect called the Aristoleans for wasn’t he the guru of beginning middle and end.
“Me and my friends went ...”
“My friends and I...” Come on, admit it as parents we have all done it. Yes, blinded by doing the best for her, we were supine to the dangers as we took her through the gradual process of language normalisation. Yes, were bringing her up under the illusion that there was an entity out there, a kind of linguistic communism, and to prepare her for that world we were going to be strict grammarians.
A week has elapsed.
“But why hasn’t she the confidence to speak up in class.”
Flummoxed, we decide, “Let’s talk to her now.” “Oh she will just try to brazen it out.” “You don’t know what the classroom is like...the people who are chosen to speak when hands go up, and the nonsense they speak. It’s usually television references (we know she has been teased for not having a television) which the teachers can identify with... if ever I speak the other pupils are speaking at the same time, yet the teachers demand absolute silence when they speak, what’s the point?

And anyway...”
As our daughter continued to protest her right to remain silent in classroom debates, I thought again of that parent’s evening and of how we, the community, have passed authority to those teachers giving them the right to be bearers of the skeptron. (In Homer, the speaker holds the skeptron, which reminds the audience that they are in the presence of a discourse which merits belief and obedience). “...and some of the teachers they never stop speaking and if they ever do listen it’s the impatient nod of the head, as if they wished you would hurry up and get on with what you have to say so as they could start talking again.
“Condescending ...yeah?” “Oh stop using big words, Dad.”
So you give her a hug, wish her goodnight and leave it at that, but you go away feeling you must delve into this after all our daughter is in this language arena...maybe with her, it is just a simple matter of confidence.
Then you do a little research and you find that this ability to speak up is a little more nuanced that the touchy feely concept of confidence. For those who ‘speak up’ must feel they have the authority to do so and those who listen must feel the addresser has the power to make them listen. It would appear this power and authority is implicit in all linguistic communication.

As I dipped my toes further into research on language what was becoming uncomfortably apparent was my own laughably naive take on it. How culpable we had been as we immersed our daughter in language; like other caring parents we thought were inculcating her into the correct linguistic disciplines that would prepare her for life.

And how did we tackle this problem? Well, we brought our objectivity to bear on this very important task, how to use language. We did so as if we were lighthouse keepers splaying our searchlight on what might become turbulent linguistic waters. and 2) the main shortcoming of our hubristic objectivism, is that it fails to reflect rigorously on its own conditions of possibility. After all the lighthouse is in the sea, we cannot stand on a rock and observe objectively as if we were momentarily on the outside, we are all on the inside and there is no outsideYou see we thought we could bring our objectivity to language because it had an invariant core. But the problem with this assumption about language are twofold, 1) language does not have an invariant core, its only core, if you can call it that, is difference and difference is not a thing, it is not substantive But no one will tell them, and maybe they shouldn’t, that the snag with difference it cannot be reified, it is relational and therefore it does not exist in space or time.
.
The problem was as we instructed Renata more in the rules of language we were unable to grasp the structure we were elucidating. We thought we were just well, you know, preparing her for ‘life’ “After all, if you wish to communicate well then you will have to speak well,” – we didn’t say, “If you acquire the form and formalities of the language field, you will gain a kind of power; a symbolic power. We didn’t do this, simply, because we didn’t know. Yet, we have always been faintly aware that there was power in language but till the ‘Parents evening’ we were not aware that those who do not partake of this symbolic power contribute in a kind of silent but active complicity to their own subjection, There are sanctions if you speak up too much, and in our daughter’s case, too little.

As to language sanctions and censorships in schools, I thought of my own immigrant status of many years ago and of how I came to judge my Irish accent with such practical severity. I felt I was a deviant because of my accent. For in my day people speaking in dialects were instructed to collaborate in the destruction of their instrument of expression. Having a regional accent meant you did not measure up and were cast out into the limb of regionalism, which teachers and fellow pupils decried. For those who do not speak properly, are the least favoured to the negative sanctions of the scholastic market. Hence the silence and the hesitation which may overcome working class children like me, in what they deem to be official or formal occasions.

I did not want my daughter to grow up with that outsider sense of being alienated. So I delved deeper and as I did so it was being revealed that language is a process which arises out of an awareness of differences and such differences themselves mainly arise within a larger classificatory context, through unconscious processes pre-formed by linguistic categories, rather than through conscious processes performing rational procedures.

Pupils arrive So Renata and her classmate arrive at the awareness of the dissimilarities in language within a circumscribed cognitive domain, most of which has been formed unconsciously. The problem arises when Renata and her classmate, encouraged by the teachers, endeavour to pin down the butterfly of language. But let me get this right, when I speak I do so from a cognitive domain which has over aeons of time developed through evolutionary means and by which our world of experience is continuously yet unconsciously constructed, classified, and mapped. By this evolutionary process and through the recursive and circular causalities of language, this process we have has given rise to forms of awareness. So when the pupils put up their hands and cry ‘Miss, Miss, Miss, me Miss’ as they do so they have a proliferation of thought.
“See Miss, I am speaking up,”
However, as long as the thought "I am" persists, so will endless cycles of apperceptions, (past perceptions constituting our present perceptions)) conceptual proliferation and further apperceptions etc. keep spinning.
Talk about spinning, where am I? I have arrived at ‘Thoughts without a Thinker.’ Well I am not going to burden Renata with that one, I mean it is bloody destabilising to say the least, even as I think about it I can help but feel a touch of ontological vertigo. Perhaps that is why they don’t teach this sort of stuff on language.

However, drawn, Holmes like, I follow the trail. So in this evolutionary process of language the unconscious structuring of experience with its processual and interactive arising of things has taken place and this had imparted the cogency of human experience, with its deep sense of subjective coherence, which is this self, or this symbolic self. Yet where the self, one is cannot individuate a subject at all. It would appear the metaphysical subject is not an object of experience at all, but a way of indicating the overall structure of experience. It would appear that the evolutionary linguistification of human mental processes has given rise to a symbolic self, which is dependent upon the reflexive possibilities of language rather than reflecting the existence of the substantive.

From this standpoint, cognition, or how we perceive, is thus neither purely subjective nor wholly objective. Like a transaction that takes place between individuals, cognitive awareness occurs at the interface, the concomitance of a sense-organ and its correlative stimulus. Cognitive awareness does not reflects things, as they are, since what constitutes an ‘object’ is necessarily defined by the capacities of a particular sense organ; say the eye, and it is well to remember that the cognitive capacities of a sense organ are also correlatively defined by the kinds of stimuli that may impinge upon them. As Capra (1998, 220) points out, "...as it keeps interacting with its environment, a living organism will undergo a sequence of structural changes... an organism's structure at any point in its development is a record of its previous structural changes and...each structural change influences the organism's future behaviour."

Here we arrive at another problem in how we view language - stimuli are always impinging upon the sense organs, say the eye, giving rise to forms of cognitive awareness; and these processes continuously but subtly modulate the structures of these organs, which in turn influences their receptivity to subsequent stimuli. The two notions - that living entails continuous cognition and cognition entails continuous modification of living structures - introduces an important causal reciprocity between the structure of sense organs and the arising of cognitive awareness. These reciprocal processes take place not only at the micro level of cognition, but also at the macro level of evolution. Both evolutionary biology and the view of dependent arising articulate models of circular causality to describe how things come into being over the long term. Through this circular, recursive and evolutionary process we arrive at what we feel to be language, but is no more than difference.

So when I perceive something, say what I am typing on this screen now, I perceive difference; an empty screen, writing it out by hand, a proliferation of recursive and circular aperceptions. For all receipt of information is necessarily the receipt of difference. To even speak of perception is to necessarily speak of awareness of differences. Awareness of differences, however, cannot arise outside of a context, since differences occur between phenomena. An absolutely isolated object would be imperceptible, like say ‘real originality’ it is impossible, for how would we know it is was original if we had nothing to compare it to.
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Contextual differences however, have no singular location. As Bateson (109) avers: "Difference, being of the nature of relationship, is not located in time or in space." Since awareness of differences arises contextually rather than independently, and is episodic rather than enduring, it has no substantive existence. Not being a substance, it neither comes nor goes anywhere. Differences have neither any actual substance nor any singular location; they are neither a something nor a nothing ontologically speaking. The differences we perceive or aperceive are to be regarded as the effects of the difference which preceded them." (Bateson, 121)

Circular causality, which classroom logic eschews, occurs in the form of recursive feedback processes, wherein the results of previous events serve as the basis for succeeding ones. The language we use refer to patterns of relationships, not properties of substances; to maps not territory; terra incognita not terra firma.
“But language must have come from somewhere, Dad?” I am beginning to talk to Renata about my new take on language.
“Well our linguistic capabilities didn’t spring fully formed from the mouth of the Gods.”
Our linguistic capabilities are part of the accumulative, constructive and interactive processes of evolution whereby cognitive processes condition living structures, which in turn condition further processes and so on. As symbolic communication dependently arose in early hominid species it became a powerful evolutionary force in its own right, radically and irrevocably changing the structures and processes of the human brain. This momentous change centred on an increasingly enlarged prefrontal cortex, where such symbolizing processes apparently occur. As language use and this ‘prefrontalisation’ mutually reinforced each other, the symbolic-linguistic mode of cognition that is dependent upon them came to dominate other, originally non-linguistic, processes. Human cognitive processes, even simple sensory ones, in other words, unavoidably arise in dependence upon our linguistified brain. Language, then, along with the systemic distinctions upon which it depends, is not something added on to human cognitive processes. Systemic symbolic thinking is constitutive of normal human cognitive processes. We live our lives in this shared virtual world. The doorway into this virtual world was opened to us alone by the evolution of language

"We cannot help but see the world in symbolic categorical terms," Deacon declares (416), "...dividing it up according to opposed features, and organizing our lives according to themes and narratives."

This linguistification of human cognitive processes thus represents a physiologically enstructured, dominating cognitive strategy characterized by compulsive yet creative recursivity, based upon words that are defined mutually and systemically, not independently or substantively, and whose ultimate meanings are conventional determined.

It is late at night, there is a moon out there reflecting its light on the back garden. A fox barks, I read on... it would seem the most deeply entrenched source of these recursive possibilities, which also doubles back to generate its own linguistically generated recursivity, is no doubt our sense of self as an enduring, experiencing agent. A fox barks, this is not the hour to be doubting the self. “This sense of self, however, derives its compelling cogency, it’s enduring and endearing allure, from the same social and linguistic matrix other words and symbols do. Like language, this symbolic self is a product of massive interdependency; like other relational phenomenon, it has no substantive existence in time or space. "It is a final irony," Deacon concludes (452),
“And if I do ‘speak up’ Dad, I know the teachers will only correct me, because they are kinds of ...instruments?” “Instrument of what?” “Well....instruments of correction, Have I got the right, Dad?”
School are not a language area for semantic freewheeling, without referring to anything in particular, they are in arena of formal rigour where linguistic norms are imposed. Through innumerable acts of correction, the educational system tend to produce the need for its own services as teachers consecrate legitimate language and conserve their monopoly in their labour of correction.

As parent we had never given a thought to the fact that the teachers were paid to teach codified language with authority for they were codified by grammarians, and their task is to encourage equivalences in a system of grammatical norms not to teach the evolutionary fact that we are the word made
Ends (2750 words)

Books researched and referred to:
Barash, David. 1979. The Whisperings Within: Evolution and the Origin of Human Nature. New York: Harper & Row.
Bateson, G. 1979. Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. New York: Bantam Books.
Capra, Fritjof. 1998. The Web of Life. New York: Anchor Books.
Carrithers, M. 1992. Why Humans Have Culture. New York: Oxford University Press.
Collins, S. 1982. Selfless Persons. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Deacon, T. W. 1997. The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.
Geertz, C. 1973. "The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man." The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.
Harland, Richard. 1987. Superstructuralism. London: Routledge.
Johansson, R.E.A. 1979. The Dynamic Psychology of Early Buddhism. London: Curzon Press.
Lakoff, G. and Mark Johnson. 1999. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books.
Lewontin. R. 1983. "The organism as the subject and object of evolution." Scientia 118:63-82.
Lewontin, R. 2000. The Triple Helix: Genes, organism, environment. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press.
Oyama, S. 2000. The Ontogeny of Information. 2nd ed. Duke University Press.
Rappaport, R. 1999. Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Restak, R. 1994. The Modular Brain. New York: Touchstone Books.
Rose, S. 1997. Lifelines: Biology Beyond Determinism. New York: Oxford University Press.
Saussure, F. 1959. General Course in Linguistics, New York: The Philosophical Library.
Stern, D. G. 1995. Wittgenstein on Mind and Language. New York: Oxford University Press.
Tooby, J. and Leda Cosmides. 1992. "The Psychological Foundations of Culture." in Barkow, Cosmides, Tooby. 1992. The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture. New York: Oxford University.
Varela, F., E. Thompson, and E. Rosch. 1991. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Waldron, W. 2000. "Beyond Nature/Nurture: Buddhism and Biology on Interdependence." Contemporary Buddhism. V.1, n. 2. Nov. 2000, pp. 199-226.
Wiener, N. The Human Use of Human Beings. (1950, 96).
Wittgenstein, L. 1975. Philosophical Remarks. Edited from his posthumous writings. Basil Blackwell.
****

Doing the Crane - How to Improve your Life by Standing on One Leg

Proprioceptors –the Sixth Sense

With a history of ankle sprains over my tennis playing career from junior onwards I hesitantly embarked on the advice of a physiotherapist – “Start retraining your proprioceptors.” “My what?” Disinclined as I was to start standing on one leg in the garden and have neighbours tut tutting “Oh look, he thinks he is a crane.” - I can now attest to the remarkable success of the physiotherapist’s advice. So what are proprioceptors and how could they help your tennis game or just improve your structural alignment, balance, gait, in your daily or for any athletic performance.

Proprioceptors - the sixth sense
Often referred to as the sixth sense, or third eye, the proprioceptor sensory system, one of the most important neurological systems of the body, is how your brain and body communicate effortlessly.

The proprioception sensory system indicates to the brain where various parts of the body are located in relation to each other. It's the sense that allows you to keep your eyes on the road while driving and knowing where your hands are on the steering wheel, as well as your foot on the accelerator. It's also the sense that allows you to play tennis with all those vagaries of movement and the various demands on the upper and lower body As we change direction on the court, side step, back pedal, stretch for an overhead, or race to the net, we use these proprioceptors to help us keep our balance.

Our sensory system and proprioceptors – the physiology:
Our sensory system is comprised of proprioreceptors in muscle tissue that monitor length, pressure, tension and noxious stimuli. Proprioceptors stimulate complex muscle spindles which then trigger a cascade of events that control fine body movements and coordination. Our everyday tasks such as walking are amazingly complex. Within the second that it takes to take one step, the brain is recruiting and orchestrating many different subcomponents of the leg to contact the ground, transfer energy from heel to and back up through the hip.


Why understanding proprioception is important: Proprioception plays an important role in keeping our bodies safe. It triggers the brain to send out immediate and unconscious adjustments to the muscles and joints in order to achieve movement and balance. While most of us take this sixth sense for granted, recognizing the functions and potential limitations of proprioception can by the key to preventing injuries and living a longer, healthier life.

Proprioceptors and the risk of injury: If your brain isn't adept at propriocepting, or your muscles are sluggish, you may fall and possibly get hurt. If you're an athlete, the risk of injury increases as the length of playing time increases, as fatigue significantly decreases your ability to balance. All too commonly, a twisted ankle happens without any contact, but just by landing wrong from a lunge or stretch for a volley or overhead. The appropriate muscles were incapable of contributing to proper proprioception because of fatigue.

How well are your proprioceptor senses functioning?
Try this: Stand up, balance on one foot and close your eyes. If you must immediately put your foot down or hands out to prevent falling, then your proprioceptors are not functioning properly.

Retraining your proprioceptors:
There are simple balancing exercises that might seem easy "on paper," but most of us require practice and time to learn and regain excellent proprioception.

* Using a nearby support or rail to hang on to, stand and balance on one leg for a minute. Without practice, most will fail at this simple task! This is a result of weakened proprioception.

* Get started on improving your proprioception by balancing on one foot. Begin with your shoes on and eyes open.

* As your balance starts to improve, close your eyes. (If you have trouble maintaining this posture for more than a few seconds with your eyes closed, do it in a doorway so you can reach out to prevent falling.)

* When you can balance easily for at least a minute, start doing the exercise with your shoes off. Again, build up with your eyes open and then closed. You can do this several times during the day. Because most people brush their teeth twice a day, this a great time to multitask and balance on one foot with your eyes closed.

The next level is to stand on a soft foam pad and bounce a tennis ball on the ground or toss it against a wall and catch it.

* As you continue to progress, use a BAPS board or balance board, which improve both your proprioception and your leg muscles' strength.

You can also incorporate proprioception exercises into your core strengthening programme.

* Balance on one foot with the knee slightly bent, take a soccer ball or, if you are advanced enough, a small medicine ball, and move the ball in four directions: over each shoulder, down to the opposite foot and then side to side.

At present I am injury-free and having convinced my neighbours that I have not morphed into a crane I am less self conscious when I stand on one leg in the back garden.. Hope I have convinced you. Good luck.